Movie Review

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: AT WORLD’S END

There are too many captains on the sea of life and not enough ship hands. The main storyline of Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: at World’s End” involves a committee of the world’s most notorious pirates joining together to defeat the powerful alliance of the British Navy and Davy Jones’ ghost ship the Flying Dutchman. It’s this committee of pirate captains, all clamoring for screen time, that makes this movie seem out of control and about 45-minutes too long.

It reminds me of what happens to an aged television sitcom, where each one of numerous actors is given his or her allotted time to perform, pontificate or pratfall, so the show becomes a series of entrances and exits, leaving no room for story.
Who is Captain Jack Sparrow anyway? I know that Johnny Depp is the star of the movie, but his character, Cap’n Jack, is just a running sight gag throughout the film. Don’t get me wrong, I like Depp's performance, but in the tangled web of a “cast of thousands” his animated antics become trapped in the scattered plot.

There are some other great performances in “Pirates of the Caribbean: at World’s End”, besides Depp’s, including Geoffrey Rush as Captain Barbossa and Chow Yun-Fat as Pirate Captain Sao Feng. Keith Richard’s cameo is as entertaining as it is remarkable. I’m not sure, but I don’t think the time worn Rolling Stone guitarist wore much make-up, yet he is easily as scary looking as the rest of the cast.

I recommend “Pirates of the Caribbean: at World’s End” to anyone wishing to escape into the fantasy of a summer blockbuster. The visuals alone are worth the price of admission. With majestic scenery and magnificent sets, the effects are more than special including the ingenious way an army of stone crabs delivers Cap’n Jack’s ship, the Black Pearl, from limbo.

For swashbuckling adventure, it is worth slogging through the swamp of characters to get to the final battle on the open sea. When the lead ships converge the effects are spectacular. But even the hectic battle scene gets bogged down in the need for each actor’s requirement for screen time. Near the climax of the movie Sparrow finds himself face to tentacles with Davy Jones, swords drawn, atop the ship’s mast, Director, Gore Verbinski, cuts away, for the apparent need of screen time for the other actors, so that by the time the movie gets back to Jack vs. Jones, I remember thinking, “Oh yeah, those guys are still fighting, and they haven’t moved since I last saw them.”

At times, the story gets so melodramatic, witness a wedding ceremony in the middle of the final battle, that I couldn’t wait for the dialog to stop. I started rooting for the errant cannon balls to start hitting their mark.

By: William Ackerley